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Monday, November 23, 2015

Managing a marketing faux pas

Marketing blunders have existed ever since marketing
has been around, after all to err is human.
Therefore, try as a company might to steer clear of
all marketing goof-ups, a marketing manager is likely
to come across a marketing gaffe over the course of
their career. Every year, dozens of companies make
certain marketing mistakes. Many popular examples
continue to be a major blot in the glorious histories
of corporate giants one of which happens to be the
Ford Pinto, a car model whose very name means a
tiny penis in Portuguese. Additionally, following a series
of explosions due
to rear end collisions,
a memo was leaked
from a Ford executive
claiming that it
would be cheaper to
pay reparations to injured
drivers rather
than recalling the
vehicles, an incident
that seriously damaged
Ford’s customer
friendly image.

Coca Cola
is another giant
who has garnered
infamy at a few occasions
due to poorly
planned marketing
tactics however in their particular case, Coke has
repeated their blunders not just once but thrice. In
1985 Coke launched a sweeter variant in an attempt
to win back younger drinkers switching to Pepsi however,
the move backfired when the lovers of the original
formula protested leading to a massive boycott
& forcing the company to reintroduce their original
formula as Coke Classic. Coke has also displayed an
abject neglect for cultural nuances as displayed by
their debacles in Dubai & China.

The recent Adidas
debacle following their sexist Manchester United
female jerseys is

another glaring example of a giant
showing that no one is immune to such slip-ups &
therefore it is important that people understand how
to handle such a faux pas.
In order to do handle such an event a company needs
to answer 3 important questions: Will the mistake
cause significant loss in revenue now & in the future?
Will it tarnish the company’s image? Will it offend
consumers? If the answer to all 3 questions is a yes,
then the company needs to take immediate evasive
steps.

In the infamous words of John C. Maxwell, “A
man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart
enough to profit from them, & strong enough to correct
them.” In order to accomplish these objectives
a company needs to take certain steps. First of all,
the company needs to act promptly & go into damage
control mode. The longer the issue is allowed to
linger, the more damage will be done. Secondly, if
the issue has offended a community it is highly advisable
to issue an apology. Thirdly, in order to control
the ensuing chaos the company needs some good PR
going their way & to
do that they need to
offer their consumers
an incentive to forgive
& forget. The incentive
can be anything
as long as it can help
reduce or takeaway
the spotlight from the
gaffe. Lastly, the company
needs to takes
steps to ensure that
such an event does
not take place again &
promote those steps
publicly.

Most often
the mix-up is a result
of multiple mistakes
however the company
needs to highlight the most glaring errors & tackle
those to re-assure the consumer that their concerns
are being taken care of. Internally, the company can
create a system to detect patterns of mistakes early
& detect the data while taking steps to ensure that all
elements involved in the previous mix-up are taken
care of. Large corporations know that at the end of
the day, avoiding such situations over a number of
decades is not possible however certain best practices
have emerged over time & if carefully followed
they can ensure that such situations need not result
in significant loss of revenue & a bad lasting image in
the minds of the consumers.

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About Markathon

Launched in April 2009, Markathon is the monthly Marketing magazine released by the Marketing Club of IIM Shillong and was the brainchild of Asit Jain, Saurav Bagchi, Dilpreet Singh, Ritul Singh, Pranab Talukdar & Soumyasanta Roy. The current office bearers are Ashok A, Kamalpreet Saluja, Pallavi, Prateek Gaurav, Shashank Singh Tomar, Sushree Tripathy, Swikruti Panda and Vaibhav Annam. This is the first monthly B-School marketing magazine which is circulated in over 50 B-Schools in India and abroad and has a reader base of over 5000. Made available in a free-to-distribute electronic format, it includes articles which cover a plethora of marketing topics and also has an ad designing competition. Markathon aims to deconstruct marketing jargons to make the subject more accessible to students. Interviews of corporate and academic stalwarts is a regular feature. The issues are characterized by rich images, detailed styling and the cover pages are especially remarkable and lend identity to the whole issue.